“The reason why we don’t put CD copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor - we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.”

or outside the movie industry, or outside the music industry, or outside the <insert favourite content management industry here>…

Michael Nygard baffled the TSA with his MacBook Air/SSD, which apparently looks more like a “device” than a portable computer, which was enough to let him miss his flight.

Fortunately, the DHS/TSA knows that being as secretive as they are is not good for the reputation, so they started a blog to deceive the public make things a little bit more transparent.

How transparent can be seen in a new post, in which Bob, apparently working in the DHS PR department, screens the MacBook Air. His findings are delusive interesting:

“The MacBook does look completely different than your typical laptop or DVD player. I can’t get into specifics of course, but there were a couple of areas on the X-ray that could pique some interest for TSOs.”

Ghost Bikes: “Ghost Bikes are small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque. They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists’ right to safe travel.”

Schneier on Security: Security vs. Privacy: “Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and — possibly — sky marshals. Everything else — all the security measures that affect privacy — is just security theater and a waste of effort.”

Have you ever seen a Drobo? Cool stuff, eh? Yes, if it werenât be USB only (letâs be honest, it sucks), therefore had a limit of 2 TeraByte per Volume and used some kind of proprietary âSAFEâ algorithm (âitâs like RAID.5, but betterâ). No thanksâŚ

Hey, Iâm a geek, I can do this on my own, canât I? - So letâs start againâŚ

Have you ever seen ZFS? Cool stuff, eh?Yes, if it didnât run primarily on Solaris and FreeBSD (sorry, too much stuff to learn at the same time). Linux, well, yeah, userspaceâŚ you wouldnât want that, would you?

Fortunately, Apple (well, yeah, most likely Steve âthe dictatorâ himself) decided to like ZFS and to port it to OS X. It wasnât ready in an Apple-kind of way for 10.5, but itâs available for developers, which I am not, but Apple doesnât know that.

Installation:

It sucks. There is a pkg installation file in the developer connection, but it only runs on 10.5.0. So, after some screwing around with pax (seriously, who wrote that man page, and what is a member of an archive file?!), I was able to extract zfs.kext (if google is your friend, you might be able to find Shawn Ferryâs documentation on how to do that). Victory is mine!

Playing around:

I wouldnât want to bore you with the umptiest description on how to create a pool - the PDF âZFS on Mac OS Xâ from Apple says it all and is a very good start (thanks Chris). Letâs just say I had two hours of fun creating pools, making snapshots and clones and swapping disks.Some additional reading:

Critics:

Well, my first plan was to rebuild a Drobo. Unfortunately, ZFS does not yet allow you to add an arbitrary amount of disks to a RAID.Z. The possibility to substitute every disk in a RAID.Z with a bigger one and afterwards just using the additional space is nice, but definitely not the same. A friend of mine suggested to use a stripeset of disks as one or more parts of the RAID.Z, which would give me at least the possibility to use all the 120, 160, 200 and 250GB disks lying around, but:

Oh come on, whereâs the fun in ZFS if you canât do something stupid?

The OS X implementation isâŚ well, yes, Beta. A source at Apple told me the data is stored ârock solidâ, but I might have some kernel panics to get it there and from there. Itâs not that bad, at least itâs predictable what you shouldnât do to avoid kernel panics (primarily: do not unplug (even unmounted) ZFS devices), but you can see that it is not yet integrated in the rest of the system:

The mounted volume has drwxr-xr-x root:sys

The Finder canât use the Trashcan on ZFS volumes. Everything gets deleted at once.

zfs umount doesnât work most of the time. Surprisingly, dragging the volume in the Trashcan does?!

The afp share names for pool and filesystems are just the poolname plus an increment: